How Church Leaders in Charlottesville Prepared for White Supremacists

From The New Yorker-

Just down the road from Emancipation Park in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a thousand white supremacists congregated around a statue of Robert E. Lee this weekend, is another historical landmark. It’s a large, two-story brick building called the Jefferson School, which first underwent construction in 1924—the same year that the Confederate monument went up—at the insistence of the local black community, whose children were barred from the city’s high schools because of segregation. Now the school is on the National Register of Historic Places.

On Monday night, a few hundred Charlottesville residents gathered at the Jefferson School, in an auditorium on the second floor, for a community meeting. Two days before, three people died and nineteen were injured when violent demonstrators from across the country came to Charlottesville with guns, shields, weapons, and flaming tiki torches for a “Unite the Right” rally. “We’ll fucking kill these people if we have to,” one of them told Vice News. A twenty-year-old neo-Nazi from Ohio ran over counter-protesters in his car, in an act that Jeff Sessions, the Attorney General, later called domestic terrorism. (The President initially condemned violence “on many sides,” then followed up on Tuesday afternoon by saying that there were “very fine people on both sides.”) But, almost as soon as they had arrived, the agitators were gone, and community members were left to try to make sense of what had just happened.

More here-

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-church-leaders-in-charlottesville-prepared-for-white-supremacists?mbid=social_facebook